


These Broken Parts

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [9]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Beating, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Hurt No Comfort, Immortality, Loneliness, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampires, canon-typical self-hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23744779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: It's just another night in a city that isn't Carmilla's home, on a world that's not her home, in a body that doesn't feel quite like home either. Just like every night before it.Title from "Words Fail" from Dear Evan Hansen.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla/Loreli
Series: Demon Eyes [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	These Broken Parts

Resignation is like a second skin. 

Carmilla wears it like a shield. If she accepts she is damned to wander the worlds for an eternity, then she won’t grieve. She won’t hold too tight to the fragile hand in hers if she accepts it’s already gone. 

She’s made and broken a thousand promises, so she swears to herself she won’t make anymore. She walks alone, unless she doesn’t, and she stays cold, until her frozen heart melts at the sight of a new smile. Beneath her resignation lives something sharper, a fresh pain that will never heal. She grieves for more than her home in the literal, in the love she lost. She grieves for how precious it was in its failings. It was ugly and brutal and made of more grays than colors, but it was hers. It was something to fight for and against, something to define herself in relation to. 

Now she drifts from bar to bar, a vengeful ghost with nobody left to punish, and she’ll fill that hole with anyone that might remotely deserve it, anyone remotely like her. When someone finds a way to hurt her, she lets them. Their boots are black and laced and steel toed, and they’re not even anyone special. They’re just the sort of brats her and Loreli used to spend their days avoiding, scared and taking their fear out on anyone they can get away with. When she stumbles down the street drunk, she looks like an easy target, and when she doesn’t fight back, they think they’re right. 

They don’t see the lack of blood; they don’t even look at her. She’s an interchangeable body, a replacement for the fuckers they really want to hurt. Her head pounds from the alcohol and the repeated blows. She doesn’t move her hands to guard her head, knows that if she starts moving, she won’t stop until she’s torn them all to bits, and maybe it’d be worth it. Maybe they don’t deserve to live, or maybe they deserve the release of death, and that’s the kind of thought that leads her here. 

They laugh with messy smiles, teeth missing and gray even though by most standards they’re kids. They’re kids, barely younger than she was when she died, and she wonders how they’d grow if she tore them apart and stitched them back together as messy as her. It’s a passing thought, in between crushed fingers and muffled grunts. They don’t deserve that, for better or worse. Nobody deserves this. She bites through her lips to keep herself from screaming or worse, laughing. Her head makes contact with the pavement, again. Something breaks in her again, and she begs for it to stay that way. 

Wouldn’t it be an ironic end to something as fucked up as her, something as monstrous as this existence? Nothing big, nothing as spectacular as some of her mistakes have been, just a back alley beating taken too far, because these assholes don’t understand her body is more fragile than theirs. It’d be funny, oh G-d, wouldn’t it be funny? She chuckles at the idea, and it makes one of them angrier. They hate her for all the wrong reasons, she wants to say, but she doesn’t try. No point trying to defend herself if she doesn’t want them dead, if she doesn’t want to start a massacre, no point trying to forge a middle path between being a fucking punching bag and a monster. She isn’t made for the in-betweens. There isn’t a world where she lives a long life, dies peacefully in a warm bed surrounded by family and people she loves. There’s one where her sudden-but-entirely-predictable death is the end and this. 

One of the garbage bags someone tossed down this alley must’ve had something perishable in it, because a rancid smell fills her nose and overpowers her. It’s better than focusing on the bits of skin she can see beneath their ragged clothes, how hungry she is beneath the distracting weight of alcohol.Maybe she’s not entirely resigned yet. Maybe that shield is as fragile as everything else to her eldritch strength, because she’s still trying to starve herself rather than accept she needs to feed. She can control it this time, she swears, if she goes a little bit longer this time, then she can prove it. The only thing she needs is whiskey to dull the slowly growing slobbering beast inside her chest. 

A heel forces her face against the ground, covering her in polluted rain water. She coughs when they let up the pressure, and she can’t tell if what’s on her face is the grime of the city or tears. _It hurts_ , she tries to say, _it still hurts._

The weight of resignation is her second skin, her shield, and her chains. If she was a better person, she might have the words to bring this to a premature end, before they got bored and wandered off to hurt someone else. She’d say something about humanity, about love, but her throat is slick with the memory of blood that’s not hers and the presence of vomit that is. 

Once upon a time, there was another ending to stories like these. She imagines those stories as she closes her eye, let the weight of exhaustion she caries around with her as heavy as that resignation consume her, and she can almost taste the ashes falling like rain, the chemicals in the air, the softness of Loreli’s lips against her cheek when neither of them could sleep...

But it’s an almost, an almost that dies as they run off, laughing like they could take on the whole damn world and win, and she’s alone again. Carmilla almost wants to cry for them to come back, because at least the pain means she’s not alone, and she doesn’t know if she manages to choke the _please_. It doesn’t matter. She’s alone anyway. 


End file.
